Even if you don’t know Don Fleming by name, chances are you own a ton of records he’s helped make. As a producer, he’s collaborated with the likes of Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Teenage Fanclub, Screaming Trees, the Posies and Hole, to name just a handful. He works for the Alan Lomax Archive and has done archival work for the estates of Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey and others. He’s fronted such groups as the Velvet Monkeys, B.A.L.L. and Gumball and was a member of the band that provided the music to 1994 Beatles biopic Backbeat. Fleming also runs the Instant Mayhem label, which recently reissued the Velvet Monkeys’ 1982 debut Everything Is Right and is about to release the solo Don Fleming 4, which features Kim Gordon, Julie Cafritz and R. Stevie Moore. If all that weren’t enough, Fleming is guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.
Fleming: On Jan. 5, 1978, I saw the Sex Pistols‘ first U.S. show, which was in Atlanta at Alex Cooley’s Great Southeast Music Hall. My friend Tom Smith and I were early and among the first people in line, so we watched the events unfold as freaks and the press arrived to welcome the Pistols. The news reported that there were five TV crews (national and local), 50 members of the press and vice squads from Atlanta and Memphis. The band showed up for soundcheck in the afternoon, and as they were rushed in and we were amazed that they all seemed about 4 feet tall. Alex Cooley’s was an odd choice for the show, a laid-back hippie club with these built-in futons on the floor that the normally sedate audience would lounge around on. The band was tremendous, and the crowd was in a frenzy. I took a few snapshots of the show with my trusty 110 camera. Years later I met Bob Gruen, the great rock photographer who had traveled with the band on the U.S. tour. I was able to go to his studio and look through the contact sheets and was pleased to acquire a fantastic unpublished shot of the band onstage.
Video after the jump.
—photo of the Sex Pistols, Atlanta, 1978, by Don Fleming
